by PHILIP VANN

Philip Vann is author of a book on the painter Dora Holzhandler, and ‘Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century’

The range of Paul Bloomer’s art is richly and intriguingly diverse. Yet its various aspects are all rooted in a sensibility of rare integrity and resolute exploratory power. Early monumental figurative drawings and woodcuts evoke an intricate vision of bitterly constrained English urban life with both compassion and abrasive wit. Latterly, there are his Shetland landscapes of turbulent sensitivity and elemental expressionism. Recent narrative paintings set around his home on Shetland show how, after ten years living there, the island’s landscape and culture and his own visionary imagination have enchantingly merged.

Born in the Black Country village of Pensnett in 1966, Bloomer left school at fifteen to take a job in the factory where his mother worked. After four years there, he ‘suddenly discovered a love of colour and drawing, which I pursued with energy and drive. Then, against all my family’s wishes, I decided to stop working in the factory. I just had to do it.’

He took an elementary art course, ‘where I learnt to draw through sheer determination. I would get up at six and draw until ten o’clock at night every day.’ In 1991 he enrolled at Nottingham Polytechnic to study art. He felt compelled to make a series of ambitious drawings portraying his background . ‘Even these seemed to be against the will of my tutors, who had a leaning towards conceptualism and abstract art.’

Returning to the factory for summer jobs, he made countless sketches, ‘intense studies of hands and faces, [evoking] the expressive tension of the hand.’ A 1988 charcoal drawing based on his mother as A Hand Press Worker shows her absorbed in a grimly repetitive task, her poignant presence redeemed by the acute attentiveness with which she and her mechanical surroundings are so skilfully observed.

A year later, Bloomer made a huge drawing, The Despondent Poet, showing ‘a factory worker though he’s secretly a poet inside – without anyone knowing it.’ His bleak yet clearly perceptive features and muscular, veiny hands (‘I could spend two days on one hand to get maximum impact’) allude to the kind of powerful creative temperament so often repressed in a remorseless industrial society.

His 1989 charcoal drawing Children of the Furnace – a grotesque, epic pub panorama of binge-drinking and dope-smoking – ‘was the most accurate representation of my generation that I could draw. It represents a hopeless existence, the world I had lived in five years earlier as a factory worker. I felt the need to make the art accessible to everyone, so abstraction was out of the question.’ Such pictures were inspired partly by ‘the urban strand of German Expressionism’, exemplified by George Grosz and Max Beckmann’, but the ‘1980s’ resurgence of figurative painting’ by British artists such as Peter Howson and Ken Currie also ‘gave me strength.’

Towards the end of his time as a student in Nottingham, he found himself irresistibly drawn, to his own surprise, to influences of religion and nature. ‘I had a strange urge then to read the Bible, and a lot of my work started to take on a religious edge, without me really being aware of it.’ A religious, often specifically biblical dimension permeates many pictures thereon, with references to figures such as Isaiah, Jonah and Christ. The 1989 drawing, The Day the People Listened, with its spontaneous street preacher reaching vertiginously ‘towards heaven’, was inspired by a preacher Paul had seen in Nottingham one day, ignored by everyone. Paul himself had given the man little attention at the time. ‘The drawing started off quite abstract and turned into an apocalyptic vision. The expression on his face implies it’s almost too late but everyone is suddenly rushing to hear what he’s got to say.’

This biblical undertow is also seen in a subtle, increasingly recurrent imagery describing rivers, lakes and the ocean as sanctuaries for the human spirit, birds as creatures of joyous transcendence as well as key dynamic forms in the bare Shetland landscape, and in the local imagery of fish and sheep with their own oblique New Testament resonances. ‘As a child, nature was very much part of my life: walking, fishing, collecting birds’ eggs. But at some point as a teenager, I got completely detached from it. Then I suddenly reconnected in a new, dramatic way.’

He was accepted as a student in 1991 at the R.A, Schools, ‘on the strength of my drawings’. Paul found the painter Norman Adams, one of his teachers there, ‘a great inspiration. His religious imagery was for me like a window into another world, a spiritual realm, without being dictatorial or dogmatic.’

As a student, he gravitated towards ‘the Sienese painters, Duccio, Lorenzetti, Simone Martini’, inspired by their ‘inventive use of space and non-linear-perspective.’ Masacio, Giotto, Hokusai, Ensor, Munch, Stanley Spencer, Josef Herman, Mary Newcomb (‘with her vision of the natural world and subtle mix of colours’) are names that recur in Paul’s conversation today. ‘Overall Nolde has made the most lasting impression – for his luminosity of colour and vision.’

Living in London, Paul met a young Scottish woman Fiona Burr, herself a graduate from the Slade School of Art. They later married, and now have two small children. The couple moved back to the Midlands but then in 1997 an opportunity arose to visit Shetland. ‘Subconsciously we must have thought we’d move there, because we loaded all our worldly goods, including an etching press, in the back of a car, and drove all the way to Shetland – and stayed there.

‘My first response to Shetland was in my woodcuts, when I was looking for shapes in a largely empty landscape. Shapes started to come in the form of birds…’ Resulting prints – portraying long-tailed ducks in rippling water vortices, each succinctly repeated; a fleet of mergansers; swans flying over isles – evoke birdlife in scintillatingly vivid rhythmic patternings.

He found Shetland ‘a paradise discovered.’ But for several years, he passed through some kind of dark night of the soul. He had to acclimatise to a new rhythm of life. ‘In winter, you are completely at the mercy of the elements and lack of light. There are very few trees and low houses, nothing to protect you, so it’s quite scary in gales. In the summer, there is light at ten o’clock at night, blazing sun even. By midnight it’s still half-light, the sun touches the horizon and so slightly dips behind. In summer, I feel so relaxed, I can’t paint; I charge myself up with light. There is a month of shining light. Everyone’s so calm on a mid-summer day. It’s magical, wandering hills at midnight then, with only nesting birds and animals around, no humans in sight.’

Initially, he was offered a studio in an old telephone exchange, its only views those of hills and sea. For five years or so, working there at night, he produced prints of birds as well as a Black Country woodcut series. It was at the end of this period that he felt ‘an inner need to go out into the landscape. I just had to take a new direction’.

So he started painting and drawing in charcoal on the spot, ‘not making a literal interpretation of the landscape but rather a panoramic viewpoint fused into one image, emphasising nature and weather and the elements.’ After years making taut figurative pictures, he was invigorated by a sense of ‘painterly freedom’, inspired by American Abstract Expressionism, Peter Lanyon’s perspective-defying Cornish landscapes and Joan Eardley’s both imaginative and quite literal immersion in coastal elements. The landscape watercolours are painted on paper already stained with a coloured ground. He takes six boards outside at a time to paint on, which ‘is vital so you can go from watercolour to watercolour, while each one dries’.

These landscapes include sunsets of molten vibrancy, colours and forms coalescing in wildly original ways – matching the indescribably transient weather – and pictures of skies bewitchingly streaked with Northern Lights (streamers and arches of coloured light), painted in sub-zero cold (‘painting at its most extreme’). Scenes of Approaching Snow are rooted in an attenuated palette of flurrying or even furiously animated tonal delicacies. ‘You can see the snow on the horizon. Closer and closer it comes. You have to paint quite frantically. Within a second, it’s a blizzard. It’s difficult to continue painting then but quite feasible to draw.

‘If I’m painting on a beach, the wind blasting the painting with sand is in keeping with the subject matter. I also use sea water to mix my colours with; the salt content makes it dry quite differently.’ He is moved by affinities between ‘rhythms of sea and land’ and primordial patterns he’s observed in archaic Celtic and Pictish art (one of Scotland’s greatest archaeological finds was the discovery in 1958 of a medieval horde of silver bowls and ornaments – now in the Museum of Scotland – on neighbouring St. Ninian’s Isle, of which Paul has a view from his studio window).

Such archaic yet still quotidian ‘rhythms of sea and land’ are seen on the canvas the artist is working on in his 1998 oil Self-Portrait. He is starting to paint the pier at Melby, a remote and magical place on the west side of Shetland, with what he calls orbic ‘healing’ shapes in the water and a church luminous on the horizon. His own body appears shadowy, perhaps alluding to a ‘dark night of the soul’, yet is permeated by subtle abstract shapes and colours, a resilient, psychedelic-seeming inner core.

The Bloomer family – mother, father and two young daughters – are the Sleepers in his 2006 painting of that title. The coverlet that protects them is embroidered, as it were, with visions of houses and an elemental basic spiral pattern of boats in a harbour. Through one open window, a bird soars over the landscape. The simple, exquisite abstract design covering the wall has an esoteric Klee-like lyricism. The summer sun at night irradiates the room with golden orange and enigmatic purplish tones.

Like Sleepers, two recent oil paintings of Birds, Lovers and Northern Lights are also pictures of mystical happiness and serene nocturnal reconciliation. Paul finds in such works ‘the paradoxical ingredients of “pale darkness” and “dark light”… characteristic in paintings right across the northern hemisphere. The unique light of the aurora also finds its way into my work.’ The patterns of the tides and the reckless yet harmonious exuberance of the Northern Lights – the subjects also of many of his plein air pictures – are intimately attuned to the presence of birds and embracing lovers in the paradoxically illumined landscape.

‘I used to see a dichotomy in my work between light and dark, the realistic urban and the abstract rural – it was like that for a while but I soon started to realise it was all one and the same vision.’ The poetic narratives of Paul’s recent Shetland paintings are the assured fruits of his longstanding search for truth about humanity and nature. As such, he is an artist on a perennial voyage of discovery. PHILIP VANN Philip Vann is author of a book on the painter Dora Holzhandler, and ‘Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century’